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The United Nations in Syria is appealing urgently for help to ease the catastrophic situation for tens for thousands of people impacted by fighting in Eastern Ghouta, outside Damascus, and the northern town of Afrin.

With five billion people at risk of having difficulty accessing adequate water by 2050, finding nature-based solutions, such as China’s rainwater recycling, India’s forest regeneration and Ukraine’s artificial wetlands, is becoming increasingly important, according to a United Nations report released Monday at the world’s largest water-related event in Brazil.

The humanitarian crisis and the resulting suffering will only worsen in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) if persistent violence is not brought under control and there is no political transition, the top United Nations relief official warned on Monday.

Making information and communication technology (ICT) readily available for vulnerable countries and harnessing it’s potential to help tackle a raft of ills – from disaster risk reduction to reaching ‘zero hunger’ – will be among the issues on the agenda at an annual United Nations information forum that kicked off Monday in Geneva.

At a time when resources for refugees from Syria is declining, the top United Nations humanitarian official in Lebanon, the country host to some 1.5 million Syrian and several thousand Palestinian refugees, has launched a funding allocation to ensure that critical relief programmes can be sustained.

Thousands of refugees who have fled violence in the Central African Republic (CAR) to Chad are facing food and shelter shortages, the United Nations refugee agency said Friday, warning that this is the largest influx in four years into the small landlocked country.

The United Nations mediator for the Syrian conflict told the Security Council on Friday that its three-week old demand for a ceasefire across the war-ravaged country was still not being implemented, and while progress had been made in Douma in Eastern Ghouta, “the bottom line is, too many civilians are still suffering.”

The lack of a political process to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to be the single largest impediment to Palestinian development, and an escalation in hostilities could completely break down service delivery in Gaza, a United Nations report said Friday.

To meet the urgent needs of nearly 900,000 Rohingya refugees and more than 330,000 vulnerable Bangladeshis in the communities hosting them, United Nations agencies and their humanitarian partners appealed jointly on Friday for $951 million.

In the span of just three days – between 10 and 13 March – more than 4,000 people, mostly terrified women and children, have crossed into Uganda from crisis-gripped eastern provinces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the United Nations refugee agency said Friday.